The latest pathetic attempt by the religious right to Otherize Barack Obama comes from David Barton’s Wallbuilders radio program, which had former Bush aide Timothy Goeglein on to declare:

Most Americans have a sense that it’s a good thing that the White House and the President recognize the most important feats day in the Christian religion – the day of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead. And yet, my friend, unfortunately the White House this year was silent when it came to a presidential proclamation on that day.

Of course, President Bush as an Evangelical Christian, knew the centrality of putting out an Easter proclamation.

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Last week, Jon Stewart had a real historian, Richard Beeman, on the show to answer some of the claims made by David Barton on the show a couple weeks ago. He began by pointing out the 14th amendment and incorporation, something Barton pretended did not exist.

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RightWingWatch did a great job of breaking down all of David Barton’s claims on the Daily Show last week, using some of my writing in the process. But they also noted this interesting exchange:

Stewart: Do you feel like the majority in a locality should be able to determine…
Barton: Yes, yes, and here in New York City, there’s schools that are 100 percent Hasidic Jewish, and I think they should be allowed to have Hasidic Jewish practices there because all 100 percent kids are…
Stewart: So you would allow, like, let’s say Dearborn, Michigan was majority Muslim…
Barton: And it is.
Stewart: Are you all right with Sharia law and the whole business…
Barton: Sure, sure.
Stewart: Well, that’s consistent.
Barton: But for somebody from the outside to come in and say “I don’t like this, you can’t do it” that’s what I have trouble with.

Guest post by Chris Rodda

OK, I’m about to do what will either be the smartest or the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

After watching Jon Stewart’s interview of pseudo-historian David Barton last night, and the extended interview online this morning, I wasn’t sure what to do. Jon did as good a job as he could against the fast talking Barton — better than anyone else I’ve seen debate this very slick character — but missed several opportunities to really nail him.

After nine years of battling Barton’s lies, the first three or four of which were spent writing my book, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History, I’m at a point of utter frustration as I watch this Christian nationalist liar get more and more influential. Jon Stewart’s interview was the tipping point. If Jon couldn’t nail this shameless and obvious history revisionist to the wall, I don’t know who can.

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Okay, so the Daily Show last night was a disappointment to me. And as I think about it, I should not have gotten so excited by the prospect of Jon Stewart interviewing David Barton. But let me explain why I did. Chris Rodda contacted me yesterday to tell me that Barton was going to be on the show and that she was working with someone from the show to give them ammunition to nail Barton with.

In particular, she was giving them some material that Barton would not have slick, prepared answers on. I’m not going to go into what that material was because Chris will likely be publishing about it soon, perhaps even on this blog. But it could have really nailed him and he would not have had such an easy time of spinning his way out of it. Unfortunately, that material wasn’t used, at least on the TV show; I haven’t seen video of the extended interview yet.
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Right Wing Watch reports on a video series being promoted by the American Family Association that — yet again — uses a fake quote from John Quincy Adams that has been debunked for a long time.

The American Family Association is promoting the lecture series “Biblical Foundations of Government with Erich Pratt,” a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and a conservative activist. The group advertises that “the Bible tells us that all governing authorities are instituted by God and are responsible for the reward of good behavior and the punishment of evil,” and by watching the series “you’ll gain a strong, scriptural understanding of the basis of American civil government and your role as a citizen.”

But the one minute trailer prominently features an uncorroborated quote attributed to John Quincy Adams, “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: ‘It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.'”

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Right Wing Watch has a short video clip of David Barton preaching, as usual, utter nonsense. He begins by claiming that religious freedom can only exist in a Christian nation because Christians are so incredibly self-confident that their religion will win out that they’re not scared of other religions and know they’ll win in a free market of ideas. Yes, your jaw should be agape in disbelief right now.

It’s funny how he just picks and chooses parts of the Bible to talk about. There is nothing in the Bible to suggest any such confidence or willingness to compete with other religions in a marketplace of ideas. There is, however, Numbers 31, where God commands the Israelites to slaughter the Midianites because two Midianite women “tempted” some Israelite men to worship their god.
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From Warren Throckmorton, reacting to David Barton’s ridiculous claim that Jefferson’s editing of the New Testament to take out all the miracles, claims of divinity and the resurrection was really intended to help convert the Indians to Christianity and was proof of Jefferson’s Christian faith:

Can you imagine how the evangelical world would react if one of today’s GOP candidates produced an edited New Testament missing Easter? I doubt we would have tributes to his Christianity, such as Barton gave in the video above.

It’s far worse than that. Jefferson explicitly denied the trinity, calling it “metaphysical insanity.” He rejected the Old Testament God as “cruel, capricious, vindictive and unjust.” If he was alive today, Barton would condemn him as an antichrist; because he’s one of the founding fathers, Barton instead pretends that he was an orthodox Christian.

In her speech at the March 24 and 25 Rediscover God in America conference in Iowa, Michelle Bachmann, like the other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates who spoke at this conference, lavished praise on their fellow speaker, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. Bachmann also revealed that her involvement in the history revisionism game goes back even further than her association with Barton. As a student at Oral Roberts University, she met John Eidsmoe, and worked as a research assistant on his 1987 book, Christianity and the Constitution. Eidsmoe is another Christian nationalist history revisionist, whose Christianity and the Constitution book predates the first edition of Barton’s book The Myth of Separation by a year. In fact, some of Barton’s lies are adaptations of Eidsmoe’s lies and half-truths, a number of which are debunked in my book. But I had no idea that Bachmann had been involved with Eidsmoe or his book until she talked about it at the Rediscover God in America conference, or that it was Eidsmoe who introduced her to Barton’s material.

But Bachmann’s admiration of history revisionists wasn’t the thing that really caught my attention in her speech at the conference. It was her detailed account of her family history, aimed at emphasizing her Iowa roots to this audience of Iowans. It was when Bachmann said she was a 7th generation Iowan, descended from Norwegians who immigrated to Iowa in the 1850s, that I started paying attention, simply because it would be mathematically improbable for a Bachmann, who is in her mid-fifties, to be the 7th generation descended from people who immigrated in the 1850s, unless each of her direct ancestors had had a child when they were extremely young. After catching this one obvious lie, I just couldn’t resist doing a little fact checking on the rest of Bachmann’s story. What I found was that Bachmann’s version of her family’s history was as much a work of fiction as anything found in one of David Barton’s books. She wants the people of Iowa to see her as one of them, so she simply changed her family history.

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David Barton gave a talk at the Rediscovering God conference — little more than a political rally for Republicans, actually — just full of the kind of overly simplistic and flat out false claims he makes about American history. He claims here that nearly every provision in the Constitution came out of the Bible, which is simply a lie. Good luck finding an analog between any constitutional provision and any Biblical verse (I can think of only one and that was merely a nod to tradition for reasons of pragmatism).

The most audacious claim is that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton “all said Jeremiah 17:9 is the basis of the separation of powers.” Huh? Citation please! Sorry, this is a flat out lie. In fact, the Federalist Papers list the sources for that and other concepts in the Constitution — the Bible is not mentioned.

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David Barton and Mike Huckabee traded compliments at the Rediscovering God conference in Iowa over the weekend, with Huckabee going to far as to say that every single American student should have to read the welter of lies Barton puts out about American history.

And I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced, at gunpoint no less, to listen to every David Barton message and I think our country would be better for it.

This was met with applause.
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Right Wing Watch reports that David Barton doesn’t just distort the history of America’s founding, he also distorts modern history. On a recent broadcast of his radio show, Barton interviewed John Guandolo, a former FBI agent that he claims was forced out by “Muslim radicals” who control the agency.

Barton: John used to be the guy who briefed the FBI on terrorism and radical Islamic terrorism and so many Islamic folks worked their way into the FBI, they got him thrown out. They said “he keeps speaking bad about Islam, he keeps saying bad things about radical Islam, you need to get rid of him.” But he’s part of Team B and he’s the guy who keeps bringing out and bringing to light stuff, so John, we thought he’d be a good guy to have examine this because he is a national expert, he did brief the FBI until the Islamic folks kind of took him and got rid of him.

I mean, this is the kind of level of ignorance that is a real problem and that’s why John is really good at what he does. And you can understand why [Eric] Holder and others in the FBI wouldn’t want Guandolo around there. These are the kind of people they are chasing off because you’re starting to see the Muslim Brotherhood actually get in to some of our institutions.

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